In an ever-more uncertain world, one thing you can say with a degree of confidence is that, right now in global affairs, all roads lead to Donald Trump. Trump’s re-election to the US presidency – while widely anticipated (especially by the bookmakers) – has kicked off something of a chain reaction.

Whether it’s his track record in his first term in office from 2017 to 2021, comments he made on the campaign trail, comments he has made since the election, his cabinet picks or comments his cabinet picks have made, the prospect of Trump assuming arguably the most powerful office in world politics in just a few weeks time is making its own weather around the globe.

In Ukraine, where the war has just passed its 1,000th day and Russia continued to advance slowly but steadily, the prospect that next year will see a ceasefire brokered by the Trump administration, followed by negotiations at which Vladimir Putin would hold many of the cards, looks to be the new reality.

The idea, cherished by Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, that Ukraine’s defenders would be able to force Russian troops back beyond the borders as established at the end of the cold war in 1991 – a notion in which he was wholeheartedly supported by his western allies – now appears to be a non-starter. All indications point to a frozen conflict, with each side holding the territory it now occupies (although one can imagine Ukraine will have more of a problem holding on to the 600 or so square kilometres of Russian soil it presently controls in the Kursk region).

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But, of course, there was already a frozen conflict in eastern Ukraine after Russia’s incursions in 2014. And – as Stefan Wolff, an international security expert from the University of Birmingham, points out – the Minsk accords on Ukraine of September 2014 and February 2015, which were supposed to maintain some degree, at least, of security and stop the fighting in the region turned out not to be worth the paper they were written on.

There’s very little chance that Trump will allow US troops to be sent to Ukraine as peacekeepers or combatants. So, Wolff surmises, it’ll be down to Europe to step up. The Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, said as much before the US election and Margus Tsahkna, Estonia’s foreign minister, has explicitly said this week that Europe must be prepared to underpin a peace deal.

Europe must ensure it is intimately involved in........

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